The Great Garden Grammar Game

On the way home from school on Thursday, Ferdy cried in the car because he said he didn't want a Ugandan penfriend.. (his school are twinning with a school in Uganda). Eventually I realised that this was because he already has a penfriend in Spain, and he thought this new penfriend would have to replace his Spanish penfriend. 

So on Friday, we talked a bit about schools in Africa, and how exciting it will be for them to have penfriends in the UK, and also how not all children can afford to go to school there and how that makes some of them sad. We read a lovely book called Beatrice's Goat about how a girl in Uganda gets a goat which enables her family to earn enough money for her to go to school.

Ferdy has also learnt a bit about commas this week, and Gil has started learning his vowel digraphs and trigraphs so we invented the Great Garden Grammar Game.

This involved the Sentencer (me), the Full Stop/Capital Letters Policeman and Chief Rubber Outer (Gil), and the Comma King and Exclamation/Question/Speech Marks Detective (Ferdy).

Stones were gathered as full-stops, dried leaves were commas and the rest was done in coloured chalk. There was a bit of grumpiness to start with, mainly about being outside when it was warm inside and slippers are more comfy than shoes.. But we all got quite into this, especially when I started taking sentences from Ferdy's book, Ratburger, and when Gil had his own phrases with his new sounds.

We played this game for much longer than anticipated and I was pleasantly surprised to see Ferdy adding in speech marks and even realising that a comma sometimes goes in a place to make a pause, leading to a more fluent reading of a phrase.

Ferdy's decided he will actually write a letter to his Ugandan class, so, you never know, it might actually include a few commas.